Lost on the Way to Armenia

 Along Turkey's north coast  Limestone cliffs descend  In tourism we're engrosed  Watch the fashion trends Black Sea gently rolls  Tourists and buskers mingle  Trinket shops extol Hoping for coins to jingle. Amasra the town is named  Twas once Roman then was Greek  It's Turkish now reframed  Of history we shall not speak Looking at the view  Enjoying restaurant eats  Jostling tourists too  Stroll up and down the streets. Amasra. It's a pretty little town. Neat concrete apartments, supported by throngs of tourists from Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir and other cities in Turkey. Very little tourism comes from outside these borders. Speaking English with very little Turkish is a serious handicap. We're getting proficient with our translation apps though. We've been in tourist towns all around the world, and similarities abound. Small shops open for long hours, many of them selling the same trinkets as their neighbor. As if someon...

May 26 We're in Ankara, Turkey. This is the capitol of the country as well the financial and administrative hub of the country. It's also the place where I would have my cataract surgery. What? Yes. One of the reasons for coming to Ankara was to take advantage of the excellent medical capabilities and technologies that also place this country in high repute by foreign travelers seeking medical care. The cost is significantly lower than in the states. In fact, the cost to have my eyes done with new state of the art lenses would have been $14,000. The same procedure with the same equipment here in Turkey was $6,000. I got my cataract surgery done in Turkey Meanwhile Gary got some dermatology surgery done. One visit was all it took, and $1400. In the US it would've been three separate visits: a GP, dermatology consultation, and the surgery, spaced a month apart if you're lucky. With separate bills for each. All this to get a dermatological cyst removed? How a...

  Gary here.  I first learned of the existence of Cappadacia in about 2010. I was doing research on bicycling around the world, which I managed to do one quarter of, but that's another story. So I was reading other cyclist's journals. People have been just about everywhere on this planet upon a bicycle and written wonderful stories of what they saw and did and experienced. A couple cycled across Turkey and stopped in Goreme, the gateway town for this place. Being touring cyclists and aficionados of stealth camping, they spent the night in a cave. I was fascinated. This place immediately went on my bucket list. So here we are in Ankara, and Goreme is a three hour bus ride away, so why not! So, just what is Cappadacia? During the Miocene, nearby volcanoes spewed out tremendous volumes of ash and small rocks. It settled on the land, still hot, and as it cooled it solidified into tuff. Tuff can be anywhere from impenetrable to fluffy, and this massive deposit was just right. Har...

Gary's post. It's about the 10 th of May. We're in Eskişehir Turkey and I'm sharing here an observation that I've had thoughts of before, but here it coalesced. Homogeneity. Erasure. Culture. I've seen plenty of it in the US. Sure, the downtown area of Portland, Maine is quite different from New Orleans or St. Augustine or Charleston. But head out into the suburbs and you cannot tell which downtown you happen to be near. They're the same. The same fast food. The same big box stores. The same failing mini-malls. The same car dealerships. The same little league diamonds. The same suburban churches.   Walk the sidewalks here in Eskişehir or Izmir or Kusadasia, and there are jewelry stores, shoe stores, green grocers, a shop selling nuts and dried fruit, another with bread and pastries, or kabobs and doners (wraps, like a gyro), clothing, etc. It's all very different from a pedestrian way in the US, but here, it just repeats. Sure there's an area which ...

Our time with our host, Yasin, in Izmir was coming to a close.  We had one more day together, albeit a rainy one, and spent most of it hanging out with him and his friend, Eren from Istanbul.  We prepared and collected the necessities for a "picnic" and headed out to the waterfront of Izmir using an "under the table" Uber service to arrive at a pier with hundreds of small fishing boats tied up.  Scruffy Turkish men of considerable age occasionally appeared as we sauntered along the pier as the biting wind and the drizzle fell from a gray, overcast sky.  As we passed, they seem undisturbed and never looked up as they mended fishing nets or spliced rope while sitting on makeshift chairs derived from various objects related to the fishing trade they were part of. Fishing boats dating the pier in Izmir Fisherman men's his net   At the end of the pier, about a 5 minute walk from where we had been dropped off, a structure appeared.  Some tables were lined outside...

May 5. Eskişehir. By Gary Winter has returned, especially at higher elevations. We left Izmir yesterday by bus, five hours, up and over some mountain passes where temperatures dropped to 6C and there were a few centimeters of snow on the ground. It won't last as today warmed up a bit and tomorrow even more.  Riding the bus helped me realize how very rugged not just this country but all of Europe is. Taking the cruise ship along the coast of Spain, France, Italy and Greece showed a mountainous coastline. Our month traveling Spain two years ago and France last year showed us a deeply crenelated topography. Dr. Suess (no, not that Dr. Seuss, notice the spelling) aka Edward Suess 1831-1914 from Austria noticed the same thing.  A chain of mountains including the Atlas in Morocco, the Pyrenees in Spain, the Alps, all of Turkey, Caucusus, Hindu Kush, Himalayas, and all the way to Indonesia. Not only that, but he looked at fossils in those mountains and correlated them to what other ...

May 4  Travel to another country means strange foods, strange customs and just a few items from some bizarre alternate universe.  Sometimes these seeming oddities are easily observed and other times they sneak up on you when you find yourself committing some social faux-pas and recognizing it only after everyone has given you an odd look, called you out for it or yelled at you.  Let's run through some of these and see what you think..... Canary Islands, Spain We're taking the public bus around Tenerife and Gary and I are waiting at the bus stop just as the next bus arrives.  The bus is a shuttle bus because they are doing some kind of track work on the trolley line so we have to take a shuttle bus.  It's free so we don't have to pay.  The bus pulls up to the bus stop and the front and rear doors open to let people off and, I assume, to let people on.  As a matter of efficiently moving people, in Boston, if all doors open for a free shuttle bus, you jus...